Anthropocene is a term that etymologically translates as new human. An epoch, which specifically focuses on human’s impact on the Earth’s geology and ecosystems. Humanity has entered phase two of the Anthropocene, due to the connectivity of its network system, it has formed both a global and multi-centred civilisation. Additionally, the exhibition makes reference to the Gaïa hypothesis, which depicts our Earth as an intelligent, networked and self-regulated system.

Life offline and online has merged – whether it is defined as biocybernetics or hyperconnectivity – the infiltration of the network is ubiquitous. It’s here, there and everywhere and permeates every aspect of our lives. The merging of the physical and digital creates a continuous vibration. Everything is linked by direct or indirect contact. Everything is connected. Everything is entangled. Everything is bathed in the same environment that unfolds in successive encapsulations, which are both visible and invisible.

Right now, we are standing at the edge of a new age where the synthetisation of the past into a ‘perfect’ (neo-)future has begun. Cultural artefacts, images and data are mined like new gold, for machines to extract. We will consume it until it all blurs. Past, present and future will melt into each other.

The digital and the internet are neither over nor surpassed, they are not a medium – it is the new era. Post-digital art is everywhere.

–Philippe Riss -Schmidt

About

HyperPavilion is a large-scale contemporary art exhibition situated on the northern side of the Arsenale di Venezia in three historic warehouses, adding up to 3000m2.

The exhibition displays a dynamic selection of artworks that address the consequences of art after the arrival of the digital, as well as investigating new ways to exhibit these outcomes. All artworks are site specific and most of them were created specifically for this project. HyperPavilion focuses on an international roster of artists, whose common objectives question, challenge and respond to furthering digital transition. Presented using technology including: large scale projections; a 360° immersive cinema; a hologram theatre; multi-screen installations and hybrid artworks. All of which come together to present a spectacular post-techno-human immersion.

HyperPavilion seeks to explore the ways in which the digital and physical worlds have merged to create an entangled hybrid reality that encompasses us globally, and now offers a new aesthetic with new consequences and new organisation.

Post-digital is not a new medium anymore, the digitalisation of the world has happened and we are living beyond the e-renaissance brought on by new ways of seeing and immersion. Digitalisation leads us to post-media, and that in turn suggests hybridisation where things become indiscernible from one other, ultimately leading to a totally homogenous implosion of heterotopias.

Currently, artists are constructing and inventing imaginary compositions from an undefined frontier; a space of otherness, confrontation and mixed identity. A coupling of the real and the imaginary. The artworks typically collect, archive, accumulate, digitalise, incorporate and erase data. They are constantly evolving.

Therefore, HyperPavilion is not about digital art, but about art in the digital age.

Theproducer

Fabulous Inc. is the Producer and Co-founder of HyperPavilion, Venice (2017). Established in Seoul in 2010, Fabulous has been producing premium film content for performing arts such as musicals, concerts, ballets, operas, and contemporary dance from all around the globe including France, the USA, Belgium, and Korea.

Fabulous, a group of creative directors, has accumulated professional perspective and skill from successful productions of digital media content. Drawing from their expertise in designing for performing arts as ‘Art as Experience’, Fabulous has produced HyperPavilion in collaboration with curator Philippe Riss-Schmidt to provide an exhibition that explores new ways of seeing.

Due to the constant merging of the digital and physical worlds, Fabulous will continue to experiment with new ways of presenting exhibitions through the tools of the new era, we are currently living in.

TheCurator

Philippe Riss-Schmidt is a curator and writer based in Paris and Paimpol. He is the Founder of PR Curatorial Office* (2016) and the Co-founder of HyperPavilion, Venice (2017). Previous key curatorial projects include: new2; drawing after digital; surface proxy; full screen; #1DAD. He organised HyperSalon, Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. He also inaugurated the #postdigital conference cycle at the École normale supérieure, Paris. He has also worked as a gallerist and art advisor in London and Paris.

Riss-Schmidt is interested in questioning the way in which the digital can drive and affect the curatorial process that surrounds exhibition making. His approach is not technologically driven, but instead focuses on the impact and implications of the digital to examine how to curate and post-curate.

EXHIBITIONIDENTITY

HyperPavilion takes place at a time of flux, culturally and technologically. The concept for such an exciting realisation hinges on an overlap of human and digital consciousness. Its graphic identity is a physical manifestation of augmented reality. Typography and surfaces are disrupted by movement and textures of heat maps in reference to brain activity and early attempts at internet cartography.

ClaudeClosky

+1

LabNT2

Uchronia | What if?

AramBartholl

Weeping Angels

PaulSouviron

Skins

The animation is in form of a self-generative graphic film for which the storyline is based on a non-linear reading of events. Simultaneously using generative instructions, analysis and shape recognition the point is to work on a program which create drawings, be able to analyse what has been drawn, and finally which takes into account its own evolution so it can ensure its continuity.

The film, as for the evolution of the drawing do not have a predetermined ending. Based on the use of genetic algorithms, the aim is to set up the conditions of appearance of the drawing within a logic of self generative evolution. The visual environment comprises a mix of several dimensions which represent meteorological phenomena and the major human activities. For this purpose, the world of Gaïa is organized as a collection of different moving phenomena where each of them evolve in an independent way influenced by real and experienced data. Each of these events can now meet within the geographical space, they interact with each other, superimpose of each other, influence each other and even erase themselves.

The visual output generated by the programmatic scenario is a convolution of elements, an aggregate of signs and representations which in themselves all have the potential to relate the general climate of the Anthropocene.

The appearance of forms (landscapes) depends on contingencies and contaminations between the phenomena and their trends. It shows a dynamic organic developed space which is organized around data flow borrowed from principal scientific climate models.

In the environment of Gaia, space and time form an indivisible 4D unified block: the drawing takes its in-formation both from the current data and those incurred by the predictive models. It is organized around four distinct modes of representation

Bio

Malrieux (b. 1972) is an artist based in Paris. She studied at the National School of Fine Arts in Paris. Her practice focuses and experiments with the conditions of narrative circulation via new technologies, history and fiction. Since 2013, her work implements an information ecology by creating digital environments that explore the possibilities of a syntax of drawing constructed by technologies, algorithms and data. By creating outcomes using various platforms, Malrieux’s works are concerned with form, narrative and knowledge, where she becomes narrator, curator and researcher.

By juxtaposing conceptually engaging ideas with an intri-guing range of formats and strategies, French artist Julien Prévieux offers fresh ways of considering both the past and the future. Prévieux’s interests span the history and current state of politics, economics, technology, and the culture of the workplace, and he incorporates their established spoken and physical languages and ways of operating to provide witty, prescient critiques.

His videos What Shall We Do Next? (Sequence #2) (2014) and Patterns of Life (2015) uniquely address movement in technology and innovation. Here Prévieux engaged profes-sional dancers and choreographers to create distinct, dy-namic narratives that highlight the quotidian, seemingly nat-ural actions of the swipe, twirl, wave, walk, and pinch.

The animation is in form of a self-generative graphic film for which the storyline is based on a non-linear reading of events. Simultaneously using generative instructions, analysis and shape recognition the point is to work on a program which create drawings, be able to analyse what has been drawn, and finally which takes into account its own evolution so it can ensure its continuity.

The film, as for the evolution of the drawing do not have a predetermined ending. Based on the use of genetic algorithms, the aim is to set up the conditions of appearance of the drawing within a logic of self generative evolution. The visual environment comprises a mix of several dimensions which represent meteorological phenomena and the major human activities. For this purpose, the world of Gaïa is organized as a collection of different moving phenomena where each of them evolve in an independent way influenced by real and experienced data. Each of these events can now meet within the geographical space, they interact with each other, superimpose of each other, influence each other and even erase themselves.

The visual output generated by the programmatic scenario is a convolution of elements, an aggregate of signs and representations which in themselves all have the potential to relate the general climate of the Anthropocene.

The appearance of forms (landscapes) depends on contingencies and contaminations between the phenomena and their trends. It shows a dynamic organic developed space which is organized around data flow borrowed from principal scientific climate models.

In the environment of Gaia, space and time form an indivisible 4D unified block: the drawing takes its in-formation both from the current data and those incurred by the predictive models. It is organized around four distinct modes of representation

Bio

Malrieux (b. 1972) is an artist based in Paris. She studied at the National School of Fine Arts in Paris. Her practice focuses and experiments with the conditions of narrative circulation via new technologies, history and fiction. Since 2013, her work implements an information ecology by creating digital environments that explore the possibilities of a syntax of drawing constructed by technologies, algorithms and data. By creating outcomes using various platforms, Malrieux’s works are concerned with form, narrative and knowledge, where she becomes narrator, curator and researcher.

A blob, a rock, a smartphone, a tiny dinosaur, a hand, a watermelon, a noodle, a plant, a knife, a balloon and
a bomb are put into a screen. you won’t believe what happens next!

“How to everything” is a generative live simulation. Using a game engine and a high quality gaming PC, a simulated environment performs continuously testing its limits. A series of actors / objects, each with individual characters, behaviours, needs and desires are set to freely interact in a space that is contained within the painting. A complex and unpredicta-ble system, that constantly defies associations and meaning, emerges.

Bio

Triantafyllidis (b. 1988) is an artist and architect from Greece. He got his MFA from UCLA, Design | Media Arts by presenting a guide called “how to everything” as his thesis, with scholarships form UCLA and the Onassis Foundation. Earlier, he received his diploma of architecture from the National Technical University of Athens. Humour, lush visuals and gaming tropes provide an entry point to his work. Webpages, virtual and augmented reality, games and interactive installations are his mediums of choice for this. At the point of their climax, his pieces often become overwhelming exaggerated or outrageous, trying to expose the audience to the underlying themes that inform his practice.

These are strongly related to internet culture and include isolation, sexuality, violence, addiction and fear of missing out. Together with a general overflow of information and its nonsensical nature, this is the part of the internet that he considers the context for his work. He has shown work in museums, including the Hammer Museum, the Armory Arts Museum in LA and various galleries such as Sargent’s Daughters, Young Projects, New Wight and Intelligentsia Gallery in North America, Europe and Asia. Theo Triantafyllidis is based in LA.

Closky does not decode for laughs. Nor does he deface signs of consumerism for the pleasure of criticizing. In a nihilist and grim manner, he brings into question the very possibility of communicating something to anyone at all.

The relationship between the various elements in his work takes precedence over their content. Thus, rather than introspection or singular narratives, he is interested in tour relationship, often impoverished, stereotypical, and repetitive, to our mental and physical surroundings.

Far from expressing something personal, the operation +1 belongs to the commonplaces of arithmetic. We learn how to add as soon as we learn how to count. The addition of one unit is a basic calculation whose result is known in advance. No chance and no affect can disrupt the rules of this age-old game. In order to map out this obvious fact and expose the automatisms of thinking and behavior, Claude Closky resorts to some common tools of technology: a computer, a screen, and a mouse. Fundamentally, the screen presents a uniform light blue background. At the center, the characters +1 are inserted in a rectangle.

The gap between the sophisticated means that are implemented and the simultaneously simple and tautological effect that is obtained by clicking +1, plunge the user into an equivocal state. Why and for what effect does the user click once or many times in a row? Complying with the inscribed formula in every respect, the result holds no surprises.

The number increases by one unit with each new click. It all began at the number one, one day in January 2000. Since, the multi-digit number displayed is nothing but the sum of everyone’s clicks.

In a seemingly naive manner, Claude Closky defaces the commonplaces of artistic thought. The dream of interactivity, which is so dear to advertising agencies and to cultural mediators, is acutely put to the test. Like a boomerang, the absurdity of some of our gestures and beliefs is thrown right back in our faces. Closky does not seek to denounce, he does not even seek to be personal. With +1, he has made a minimalist conceptual work accessible to anyone who is interested, from any computer with an Internet connection.

Bio

Closky has no formal training as a visual artist. He entered the ENSAD (Ecole National Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs) in 1982 but quit at the end of the first year to co-found The Ripoulin Brothers, a street artist collective. In 1988 he left the group to develop his independent work. Language is his model to articulate images, text, numbers, and sounds collected in our environment, or made in his studio. Closky’s projects always find alternative ways to emancipate themselves from the formats imposed by the sites where they are exhibited. He seeks to point out the contradictions of our contemporary society and its representations, but also to question the role of art as producer of a cultural consensus and set of values. His works confront and question our environment, the conditions and benefits of artistic production, and its relation to an audience. An award-winning artist, since 2006 he has taught at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Recently, Claude Closky’s work has been show in Riga at the Riga Art Space (2016), in Paris at Galerie Laurent Godin (2016), in Shanghai at Bazaar Compatible Program (2015), in Linz at Memphis (2015), in Paris at the Centre Pompidou (2015), in Gifu at the Museum of Fine Arts (2015), in Moscow at the Multimedia Art Museum (2014), in San Francisco at the Young – Legion of Honor (2014), in Edinburgh at Summerhall (2014) and in México at Museo Jumex (2014).

Gaiartefacts are objects that aim to reconnect ourselves mentally and emotionally to the cosmic continuum. Massoulier calls this cosmic continuum ‘the ontological continuity between macroscopic objects (a star, a galaxy, an atmosphere) and microscopic or intermediate objects (e.g. a tree stump, a living cell, a microprocessor or a great ape of Gabon).

The Gaiartefacts crystallize a thought or a theory: the inert-living continuity, the theory of the panspermia, the thermal dissipation of the printed circuits energy. The idea then becomes visual aesthetic (the etymology of the aesthetic refers precisely to the idea of ‘making sensitive to’).

The Gaiartefacts aim to raise awareness of the continuum. A jellyfish is projected on a rock, whereby she seems to no longer want to dwell. The fossil is in motion and leaves in boredom. A piece of coal is transformed into a static comet; the cells of matter are ejected in a whirl of particles, ready to secrete the first bricks of life. A computer chipset is irradiated with light and evacuates its heat through tentacles of copper. A strange stone projects a profile in a tiny solar flare. The eye becomes macroscopic. A Plexiglas porthole propels us into a wormhole. The planetary landscapes scroll until the appearance of a colourful vortex, soon indistinguishable.

Bio

Massoulier (b. 1983) primarily uses sculpture and video to produce hybrid and dynamic forms that are nourished by an imaginary of “hard sciences”, anthropology or archeology, as well as philosophical questions born of the recent evolution of human societies: manipulation of the living, the appearance of the post-human and the reign of entropy. He thus articulates his plastic work around a triple relation: the one that binds Deep Time, in other words Inaccessible History, to the cosmic and the concept of Emergence. Massoulier has recently graduated from the fine school of art of Lyon.

The Council is inspired by August Rodin’s famous sculpture “The Thinker,” which portrays a nude male figure in deep contemplation. Belgian artist Frederik De Wilde wondered: “What is The Thinker thinking now? How would a 21st Century Thinker look, feel and think like?” These seemingly simple questions gave rise to The Council.

The Council is an artistic installation that consists of a post-contemporary Thinker sculpture equipped with ‘artificial brains,’ presenting us a glimpse of its ‘private,’ yet hyperconnected, metaphysical musings, corrupted memories, digital ruins, uncertain spaces and vectors of thought by the means of image and sound.

De Wilde’s Thinker is surrounded 38 screens, each connected to a Raspberry Pi’s running custom code, -acting like neurons and synapses in the brain-, mounted on Nero Marquina marble pedestals. The installation runs custom pixel sorting algorithms exposing the nature of digital images (i.e. pixels) and how easily we can manipulate them, a mesh network and datamining code mining for post-contemporary ruins like e-waste mountains.

In as much The Council is an odysseus through the Deep Web or a descend into the uncanny heart of Darknet it’s primarily created as access point for the viewers minds and thoughts. Hence, the key element to ‘unlock’ De Wilde’s Thinker is the specta(c)tor which lies at the heart of The Council.

‘’It is the age of resynthesising the past into a ‘perfect’ (neo-)future has begun. Cultural artefacts, images, data, ... are the new gold. Machines will delve it, we’ll consume it till all blurs. Past, present and future will melt into each other.’’ – Artist Frederik De Wilde

Bio

De Wilde is a Brussels-based artist working primarily in multimedia. He studied at the LUCA School of Arts. The conceptual crux of De Wilde’s artistic praxis are the notions of the inaudible, intangible and invisible. It is this interstitial territory that De Wilde explores in his various works. Sometimes on the side of the technological, often in the conceptual, perceptual, sensorial and human register. De Wilde’s art is grounded in the interaction between complex systems, both biological and technological as societal. An excellent example of his work is the conceptualisation, and creation, of the Blackest-Black art made in collaboration with American universities and NASA. With this work, he received the Arts Electronica Next Idea Award in 2010 and the Best European Collaboration Award between an artist and scientist in 2011.

Various materials
750 × 90 × 120 cm
Courtesy HyperPavilion, Venice

Anthropic combinations of entropic elements, consists of a corpus of sculptural forms. The ensemble could suggest a three-dimensional board by Ernst Haeckel or a diversified sample of rocks of the five continents.

Minerals, plants and human artefacts assemble and coagulate. They bring out a hybrid protean landscape; a collection of small entities that seem both: inert and dynamic, colourful and dark. The silica and the organic collide to merge or dislocate randomly. The real fractals itself in a multidirectional evolutionary cycle; materials and objects of the technè disappear and re-emerge by effects of dilution and condensation. The currents are invisible. All of this must be seized. The atomization of structures accelerates this movement of recombination and metamorphosis.

Entropic chance guides the cycle of births and disappearances. The biotech-no- geological forms liquefy, metamorphose and recombine in a growing cycle that points to the infinitely small.

The whole operates as a sculptural attempt to sample and arrange this moving material.

Bio

Massoulier (b. 1983) primarily uses sculpture and video to produce hybrid and dynamic forms that are nourished by an imaginary of “hard sciences”, anthropology or archeology, as well as philosophical questions born of the recent evolution of human societies: manipulation of the living, the appearance of the post-human and the reign of entropy. He thus articulates his plastic work around a triple relation: the one that binds Deep Time, in other words Inaccessible History, to the cosmic and the concept of Emergence. Massoulier has recently graduated from the fine school of art of Lyon.

Closky does not decode for laughs. Nor does he deface signs of consumerism for the pleasure of criticizing. In a nihilist and grim manner, he brings into question the very possibility of communicating something to anyone at all.

The relationship between the various elements in his work takes precedence over their content. Thus, rather than introspection or singular narratives, he is interested in tour relationship, often impoverished, stereotypical, and repetitive, to our mental and physical surroundings.

Far from expressing something personal, the operation +1 belongs to the commonplaces of arithmetic. We learn how to add as soon as we learn how to count. The addition of one unit is a basic calculation whose result is known in advance. No chance and no affect can disrupt the rules of this age-old game. In order to map out this obvious fact and expose the automatisms of thinking and behavior, Claude Closky resorts to some common tools of technology: a computer, a screen, and a mouse. Fundamentally, the screen presents a uniform light blue background. At the center, the characters +1 are inserted in a rectangle.

The gap between the sophisticated means that are implemented and the simultaneously simple and tautological effect that is obtained by clicking +1, plunge the user into an equivocal state. Why and for what effect does the user click once or many times in a row? Complying with the inscribed formula in every respect, the result holds no surprises.

The number increases by one unit with each new click. It all began at the number one, one day in January 2000. Since, the multi-digit number displayed is nothing but the sum of everyone’s clicks.

In a seemingly naive manner, Claude Closky defaces the commonplaces of artistic thought. The dream of interactivity, which is so dear to advertising agencies and to cultural mediators, is acutely put to the test. Like a boomerang, the absurdity of some of our gestures and beliefs is thrown right back in our faces. Closky does not seek to denounce, he does not even seek to be personal. With +1, he has made a minimalist conceptual work accessible to anyone who is interested, from any computer with an Internet connection.

Bio

Closky has no formal training as a visual artist. He entered the ENSAD (Ecole National Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs) in 1982 but quit at the end of the first year to co-found The Ripoulin Brothers, a street artist collective. In 1988 he left the group to develop his independent work. Language is his model to articulate images, text, numbers, and sounds collected in our environment, or made in his studio. Closky’s projects always find alternative ways to emancipate themselves from the formats imposed by the sites where they are exhibited. He seeks to point out the contradictions of our contemporary society and its representations, but also to question the role of art as producer of a cultural consensus and set of values. His works confront and question our environment, the conditions and benefits of artistic production, and its relation to an audience. An award-winning artist, since 2006 he has taught at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Recently, Claude Closky’s work has been show in Riga at the Riga Art Space (2016), in Paris at Galerie Laurent Godin (2016), in Shanghai at Bazaar Compatible Program (2015), in Linz at Memphis (2015), in Paris at the Centre Pompidou (2015), in Gifu at the Museum of Fine Arts (2015), in Moscow at the Multimedia Art Museum (2014), in San Francisco at the Young – Legion of Honor (2014), in Edinburgh at Summerhall (2014) and in México at Museo Jumex (2014).

For HyperPavilion, Vincent Broquaire is showing Refraction, a site specific video installation of an external landscape appearing from between the arches – offering the viewer an unprecedented point of view. The installation consists of two synchronized video projections, and actively questions the audiences’ own view, eyes and perception. The video diptych has connotations of glasses, or binoculars; an instrument looked through to observe the world and its underlying complexities.

The landscape scrolls like a glance, but suddenly, this looks seems to go too far and reveals to the spectator a new scene, a privileged moment. Impassive characters work in an mechanical optimism. The nature which is offered to us reveals its reverse is modelled like an interchangeable decoration, constantly evolving, entirely controlled by man.

The fabricated landscape merges with the natural landscape, the digital and mechanical worlds intersect and seem to form a single reality. As seen through a prism that divides light and waves, the world seems to both dislocate and rebuild itself by the hand of man. The refraction takes place, the horizon shifts and then aligns itself, like the eye and the human brain, which reorganize the information after having perceived it optically. In this installation, Vincent Broquaire reinterprets this physical phenomenon reveals the discrepancies between; an original, nature and the desire of the human being to control the real.

Bio

Broquaire is a Strasbourg-based artist. He studied at the Ecole des arts décoratifs in Strasbourg. With his distinctive, deceptively simple style of ink drawings, Vincent Broquaire finds moments of humor and poignancy in the everyday. In his clean, small-scale works on paper, a cast of tiny humans inhabit a world at once flat and minimalist, yet easily recognizable as our own for the foibles and idiosyncrasies encountered there. Expanding his illustrations into further dimensions, Broquaire has more recently turned to producing books and, most notably, animations, which bring to life witty takes on technology and man’s incursion into nature. In one video, construction equipment relocates an island in the middle of the ocean, while others depict whimsical scenes of his characters draining lakes or struggling with computers. “We live in an age where very little of nature has not been touched by man, and technology is effectively an extension of our bodies and mind,” he says. “Is it not time to question the inherited oppositions of man versus nature, man versus the machine, and even the physical versus the virtual?” In all media, Broquaire emphasizes the importance of sequence and juxtaposition as a means of exploring his fraught subject matter.

Heralded by the futuristic computer-generated cityscapes that have become a signature feature of his work, Lawrence Lek’s mini-opus Geomancer is less inclined to map the building blocks of the urban architecture of tomorrow than to try and summon up the spirit of our rapidly dawning age - one whose characteristics, Lek implies, include the growing ascendancy of the cultural phenomenon of Sino-Futurism. As the geopolitical axis tilts fur-ther to the East, and as once-dominant economic/technological models are cast into doubt, Lek alights on a longstanding tension between the place of the human and the role of the machine, sharpened by contemporary hopes and anxieties around the rise of East Asia, and by speculations that new forms of artificial intelligence, already outperforming mere mortals in matters of automation and aggregation, will challenge us in more creative skills as well.

In Lek’s video, one such AI awakens above Singapore on the eve of the city-state’s cen-tennial celebrations in 2065. Mindful of the apparent relegation of AI to subservient roles in society, it determines that, from all the possible choices available to it, by far the best thing to be is an artist. Already a prodigy with numbers, it seeks to feed the other side of its sa-vant-like brain, gorging on the products of cultural history with a geeky frenzy that occasionally undermines its aspiration to the lofty coolness of a lotus-eating aesthete. Part phil-osophical reflection on where ‘genius’ resides, part playful inventory of how science fiction has dealt with these eternal human/automaton themes, Geomancer is provocative stimula-tion for both the eye and the mind.

Bio

Lek (b. 1982) is a London-based artist working primarily with the moving image. He studied at The Cooper Union (2012). Recent exhibitions include: Neither One Thing Or Another at Jerwood Space; All Channels Open at Wysing Arts Centre (both 2017); Glasgow International 2016 at Tramway; SeMA Mediacity Seoul Biennial at Seoul Museum of Art; Missed Connections at Julia Stoschek Collection; New Realities at Espacio Fundacion Telefonica; Secret Surface at KW Institut (all 2016); Software, Hard Problem at Cubitt Gallery and The Uncanny Valley at Wysing Arts Centre (both 2015). Lawrence Lek creates speculative worlds and site-specific simulations using gaming software, video, installation and performance. Often based on real places, his digital environments reflect the impact of the virtual on our perception of reality.

A landscape where humans have vanished and nature and technology coexist, negotiating their boundaries and forming unexpected connections. A camera is endlessly panning this landscape, observing the ongoing dialogue between unsupervised machines and net-worked nature.

The difference between nature and landscape is the presence of humans. Here, the ideas of nature and technology are documented in the form of an ongoing dialogue – What is na-ture and what is technology in the absence of human intention and intervention? How would entropy work if suddenly all humanity were to disappear from the face of the earth, but all of its technological infrastructure were left to run its course unsupervised? How would the technological relics begin a conversation with natural networks and what new economies of survival would emerge. This is a story of underlying forces that shape what we perceive as our environment, intact or constructed. A story of alien invasive species, highjacking the e-commerce infrastructure of amazon and ebay to sprawl around the plan-et. Concealed, amorphous and abstracted organisms, trying to trick the all-seeing algo-rithms of machine vision, manufacturing mechanisms to survive and dominate over land and other critters. It is nature adapting to fight the threat of an AI singularity, and the Singu-larity trying to understand and map the vast network of Gaia and come to a mutual agree-ment on managing the planet’s resources while engaging in a dual game of mimicking be-haviors that addle the boundaries between natural and artificial. This story is told through a mysterious eye that traverses the landscape, observing it with the curiosity of an explor-er. Sometimes zooming back as if it is all-knowing and sometimes going into near-erotic detail. It sees, cuts, deconstructs and retopologizes the ever changing terrain and its ‘inhabitants’, creating a dual simultaneous perception, becoming a kind of an ‘animal’ itself but unfamiliar to others.

Bio

Triantafyllidis (b. 1988) is an artist and architect from Greece. He got his MFA from UCLA, Design | Media Arts by presenting a guide called “how to everything” as his thesis, with scholarships form UCLA and the Onassis Foundation. Earlier, he received his diploma of architecture from the National Technical University of Athens. Humour, lush visuals and gaming tropes provide an entry point to his work. Webpages, virtual and augmented reality, games and interactive installations are his mediums of choice for this. At the point of their climax, his pieces often become overwhelming exaggerated or outrageous, trying to expose the audience to the underlying themes that inform his practice.

These are strongly related to internet culture and include isolation, sexuality, violence, addiction and fear of missing out. Together with a general overflow of information and its nonsensical nature, this is the part of the internet that he considers the context for his work. He has shown work in museums, including the Hammer Museum, the Armory Arts Museum in LA and various galleries such as Sargent’s Daughters, Young Projects, New Wight and Intelligentsia Gallery in North America, Europe and Asia. Theo Triantafyllidis is based in LA.

Closky does not decode for laughs. Nor does he deface signs of consumerism for the pleasure of criticizing. In a nihilist and grim manner, he brings into question the very possibility of communicating something to anyone at all.

The relationship between the various elements in his work takes precedence over their content. Thus, rather than introspection or singular narratives, he is interested in tour relationship, often impoverished, stereotypical, and repetitive, to our mental and physical surroundings.

Far from expressing something personal, the operation +1 belongs to the commonplaces of arithmetic. We learn how to add as soon as we learn how to count. The addition of one unit is a basic calculation whose result is known in advance. No chance and no affect can disrupt the rules of this age-old game. In order to map out this obvious fact and expose the automatisms of thinking and behavior, Claude Closky resorts to some common tools of technology: a computer, a screen, and a mouse. Fundamentally, the screen presents a uniform light blue background. At the center, the characters +1 are inserted in a rectangle.

The gap between the sophisticated means that are implemented and the simultaneously simple and tautological effect that is obtained by clicking +1, plunge the user into an equivocal state. Why and for what effect does the user click once or many times in a row? Complying with the inscribed formula in every respect, the result holds no surprises.

The number increases by one unit with each new click. It all began at the number one, one day in January 2000. Since, the multi-digit number displayed is nothing but the sum of everyone’s clicks.

In a seemingly naive manner, Claude Closky defaces the commonplaces of artistic thought. The dream of interactivity, which is so dear to advertising agencies and to cultural mediators, is acutely put to the test. Like a boomerang, the absurdity of some of our gestures and beliefs is thrown right back in our faces. Closky does not seek to denounce, he does not even seek to be personal. With +1, he has made a minimalist conceptual work accessible to anyone who is interested, from any computer with an Internet connection.

Bio

Closky has no formal training as a visual artist. He entered the ENSAD (Ecole National Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs) in 1982 but quit at the end of the first year to co-found The Ripoulin Brothers, a street artist collective. In 1988 he left the group to develop his independent work. Language is his model to articulate images, text, numbers, and sounds collected in our environment, or made in his studio. Closky’s projects always find alternative ways to emancipate themselves from the formats imposed by the sites where they are exhibited. He seeks to point out the contradictions of our contemporary society and its representations, but also to question the role of art as producer of a cultural consensus and set of values. His works confront and question our environment, the conditions and benefits of artistic production, and its relation to an audience. An award-winning artist, since 2006 he has taught at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Recently, Claude Closky’s work has been show in Riga at the Riga Art Space (2016), in Paris at Galerie Laurent Godin (2016), in Shanghai at Bazaar Compatible Program (2015), in Linz at Memphis (2015), in Paris at the Centre Pompidou (2015), in Gifu at the Museum of Fine Arts (2015), in Moscow at the Multimedia Art Museum (2014), in San Francisco at the Young – Legion of Honor (2014), in Edinburgh at Summerhall (2014) and in México at Museo Jumex (2014).

Website on touch screen
Courtesy HyperPavilion, Venice and LAB NT2

In a world that draws our attention to the present moment, both facts and stories are now subject to fluctuations, whether fictional or virtual. What if we started inventing the truths we desired, to the detriment of genuine facts? What kind of worlds would this create?

Uchronia | What if? offers a collection of online works that create uncommon, digital versions of the world and of history. They create speculative futures, revisiting history by exploring new approaches to political and social impasses; exploiting a dystopian internet and alternative networks; confronting multiple experiences of time, both human and machine-based.
Featuring artists:

Bio

Laboratory NT2 (founded in 2004) is a collective of researchers based at the University of Québec in Montréal (Canada) working to promote digital art and literature, to critically analyse digital culture and to archive hypermedia artworks. Its main focus is the development of novel strategies for research in Digital Humanities. The Lab NT2’s work relies on the hypothesis that current artistic and literary creation offers crucial insights into the practices of tomorrow.

The installation Weeping Angel consists of a large carpet printed with Internet marketing and user tracking companies on top of which a mirror covered, disguised anti-riot police tank is parked. Real life, specially equipped security guards patrolling the exhibition space and ask the visitors for their phones to check them for flaws, hacking attacks and their social media profiles. The guards are fully equipped wearing body protection, riot sticks, flash light etc and have the typical intimidating appearance in a black uniform. As special items they are holding a shield made of a mirror and they are wearing a special pair of gods-eye VR glasses. Visitors have the impression the guards are a technologically advanced, sophisticated anti cyber terror special unit.

“Are the mirror shields and tank diverting cyber attacks?”
“Can I get passed them without handing over my phone?”
“Do they have face recognition?”
“What do they know about me?”
“Have they special capabilities?”
“What information they see on the glasses?”

Weeping Angel tries to capture the dark age we are about to enter, with ever growing surveillance, terror attacks and cyber-war accusations on a daily basis. While we drink our beloved cheap hot coffee and chill on our fluffy carpet at home thousands of companies retrieve and deal with our personal data, violating our personal rights. Increasing military like police controls the cities, democracies falling apart and hacking accusations are part of everyday global politics. We have to admit we already live in 1984! Weeping Angel refers to the CIA code name for hacked Samsung TVs originated in the Dr. Who series:http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Weeping_Angel

Bio

Bartholl (b. 1972) studied at UdK – University of the Arts Berlin (2002). His work creates an interplay between the internet, culture and reality. How do our taken-for-granted communication channels influence us? Bartholl asks not just what humans are doing with media, but what media is doing with humans. Tensions between public and private, online and offline, techno-lust and everyday life are at the core of his work and his public interventions and installations, often entailing surprisingly physical manifestations of the digital world, challenging our concepts of reality and incorporeality. Bartholl has exhibited at MoMA Museum of Modern Art NY, the Pace Gallery NY and London’s Hayward Gallery as well as conducting countless workshops, talks and performances internationally. Bartholl lives and works in Berlin.

Matter is matter in these four sculptures, by looking through the prism of 3D without any digital. The jars, reminiscent of an antique era, are stuck in grids that remind us of the 3D programs where possibilities of changing skins and textures are endless. The drapes become those skins and personify each structure.

Skins are all this personalities or avatars you can change at any time on programs. The video brings the question of scale and production by imitating and using the exact same codes and methods of 3D pre-visualisation software.

Paul Souviron produces analogic 3D renderings the same way the sculptures video that you see on the monitor is actually a hand-made physical model recorded on a smartphone, shot in the artist’s living room.

The three elements (jar/drape/grid) embedded in each other, together with the video, link ancient and contemporary, archeology and computing.

Technology is not the point, they are not post-internet sculptures. For Paul Souviron the physical and virtual worlds are inseparable components of the same merged reality.

Bio

Souviron (b. 1979) is an artist working primarily in sculpture. His work synthesises practices in volume and sound that are explored through sculptural installations and environments in which he plays with a balance of interaction and frustration. These tensions are magnified in his practice, which disturb and provoke the societal balance, so that we can question the unstable world we live in. Souviron’s works question man’s ability to exhaust these natural resources and to scuttle the ecosystem services that ecosystems provide. His works reveal man’s stubbornness in anthropizing the world around him, even as scientists put forward the hypothesis of a new geological epoch, which would succeed the Holocene, and which they designate under the neologism of Anthropocene.

The Show

The animation is in form of a self-generative graphic film for which the storyline is based on a non-linear reading of events. Simultaneously using generative instructions, analysis and shape recognition the point is to work on a program which create drawings, be able to analyse what has been drawn, and finally which takes into account its own evolution so it can ensure its continuity.

The film, as for the evolution of the drawing do not have a predetermined ending. Based on the use of genetic algorithms, the aim is to set up the conditions of appearance of the drawing within a logic of self generative evolution. The visual environment comprises a mix of several dimensions which represent meteorological phenomena and the major human activities. For this purpose, the world of Gaïa is organized as a collection of different moving phenomena where each of them evolve in an independent way influenced by real and experienced data. Each of these events can now meet within the geographical space, they interact with each other, superimpose of each other, influence each other and even erase themselves.

The visual output generated by the programmatic scenario is a convolution of elements, an aggregate of signs and representations which in themselves all have the potential to relate the general climate of the Anthropocene.

The appearance of forms (landscapes) depends on contingencies and contaminations between the phenomena and their trends. It shows a dynamic organic developed space which is organized around data flow borrowed from principal scientific climate models.

In the environment of Gaia, space and time form an indivisible 4D unified block: the drawing takes its in-formation both from the current data and those incurred by the predictive models. It is organized around four distinct modes of representation

Bio

Malrieux (b. 1972) is an artist based in Paris. She studied at the National School of Fine Arts in Paris. Her practice focuses and experiments with the conditions of narrative circulation via new technologies, history and fiction. Since 2013, her work implements an information ecology by creating digital environments that explore the possibilities of a syntax of drawing constructed by technologies, algorithms and data. By creating outcomes using various platforms, Malrieux’s works are concerned with form, narrative and knowledge, where she becomes narrator, curator and researcher.

By juxtaposing conceptually engaging ideas with an intri-guing range of formats and strategies, French artist Julien Prévieux offers fresh ways of considering both the past and the future. Prévieux’s interests span the history and current state of politics, economics, technology, and the culture of the workplace, and he incorporates their established spoken and physical languages and ways of operating to provide witty, prescient critiques.

His videos What Shall We Do Next? (Sequence #2) (2014) and Patterns of Life (2015) uniquely address movement in technology and innovation. Here Prévieux engaged profes-sional dancers and choreographers to create distinct, dy-namic narratives that highlight the quotidian, seemingly nat-ural actions of the swipe, twirl, wave, walk, and pinch.

A blob, a rock, a smartphone, a tiny dinosaur, a hand, a watermelon, a noodle, a plant, a knife, a balloon and
a bomb are put into a screen. you won’t believe what happens next!

“How to everything” is a generative live simulation. Using a game engine and a high quality gaming PC, a simulated environment performs continuously testing its limits. A series of actors / objects, each with individual characters, behaviours, needs and desires are set to freely interact in a space that is contained within the painting. A complex and unpredicta-ble system, that constantly defies associations and meaning, emerges.

Bio

Triantafyllidis (b. 1988) is an artist and architect from Greece. He got his MFA from UCLA, Design | Media Arts by presenting a guide called “how to everything” as his thesis, with scholarships form UCLA and the Onassis Foundation. Earlier, he received his diploma of architecture from the National Technical University of Athens. Humour, lush visuals and gaming tropes provide an entry point to his work. Webpages, virtual and augmented reality, games and interactive installations are his mediums of choice for this. At the point of their climax, his pieces often become overwhelming exaggerated or outrageous, trying to expose the audience to the underlying themes that inform his practice.

These are strongly related to internet culture and include isolation, sexuality, violence, addiction and fear of missing out. Together with a general overflow of information and its nonsensical nature, this is the part of the internet that he considers the context for his work. He has shown work in museums, including the Hammer Museum, the Armory Arts Museum in LA and various galleries such as Sargent’s Daughters, Young Projects, New Wight and Intelligentsia Gallery in North America, Europe and Asia. Theo Triantafyllidis is based in LA.

Closky does not decode for laughs. Nor does he deface signs of consumerism for the pleasure of criticizing. In a nihilist and grim manner, he brings into question the very possibility of communicating something to anyone at all.

The relationship between the various elements in his work takes precedence over their content. Thus, rather than introspection or singular narratives, he is interested in tour relationship, often impoverished, stereotypical, and repetitive, to our mental and physical surroundings.

Far from expressing something personal, the operation +1 belongs to the commonplaces of arithmetic. We learn how to add as soon as we learn how to count. The addition of one unit is a basic calculation whose result is known in advance. No chance and no affect can disrupt the rules of this age-old game. In order to map out this obvious fact and expose the automatisms of thinking and behavior, Claude Closky resorts to some common tools of technology: a computer, a screen, and a mouse. Fundamentally, the screen presents a uniform light blue background. At the center, the characters +1 are inserted in a rectangle.

The gap between the sophisticated means that are implemented and the simultaneously simple and tautological effect that is obtained by clicking +1, plunge the user into an equivocal state. Why and for what effect does the user click once or many times in a row? Complying with the inscribed formula in every respect, the result holds no surprises.

The number increases by one unit with each new click. It all began at the number one, one day in January 2000. Since, the multi-digit number displayed is nothing but the sum of everyone’s clicks.

In a seemingly naive manner, Claude Closky defaces the commonplaces of artistic thought. The dream of interactivity, which is so dear to advertising agencies and to cultural mediators, is acutely put to the test. Like a boomerang, the absurdity of some of our gestures and beliefs is thrown right back in our faces. Closky does not seek to denounce, he does not even seek to be personal. With +1, he has made a minimalist conceptual work accessible to anyone who is interested, from any computer with an Internet connection.

Bio

Closky has no formal training as a visual artist. He entered the ENSAD (Ecole National Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs) in 1982 but quit at the end of the first year to co-found The Ripoulin Brothers, a street artist collective. In 1988 he left the group to develop his independent work. Language is his model to articulate images, text, numbers, and sounds collected in our environment, or made in his studio. Closky’s projects always find alternative ways to emancipate themselves from the formats imposed by the sites where they are exhibited. He seeks to point out the contradictions of our contemporary society and its representations, but also to question the role of art as producer of a cultural consensus and set of values. His works confront and question our environment, the conditions and benefits of artistic production, and its relation to an audience. An award-winning artist, since 2006 he has taught at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Recently, Claude Closky’s work has been show in Riga at the Riga Art Space (2016), in Paris at Galerie Laurent Godin (2016), in Shanghai at Bazaar Compatible Program (2015), in Linz at Memphis (2015), in Paris at the Centre Pompidou (2015), in Gifu at the Museum of Fine Arts (2015), in Moscow at the Multimedia Art Museum (2014), in San Francisco at the Young – Legion of Honor (2014), in Edinburgh at Summerhall (2014) and in México at Museo Jumex (2014).

Gaiartefacts are objects that aim to reconnect ourselves mentally and emotionally to the cosmic continuum. Massoulier calls this cosmic continuum ‘the ontological continuity between macroscopic objects (a star, a galaxy, an atmosphere) and microscopic or intermediate objects (e.g. a tree stump, a living cell, a microprocessor or a great ape of Gabon).

The Gaiartefacts crystallize a thought or a theory: the inert-living continuity, the theory of the panspermia, the thermal dissipation of the printed circuits energy. The idea then becomes visual aesthetic (the etymology of the aesthetic refers precisely to the idea of ‘making sensitive to’).

The Gaiartefacts aim to raise awareness of the continuum. A jellyfish is projected on a rock, whereby she seems to no longer want to dwell. The fossil is in motion and leaves in boredom. A piece of coal is transformed into a static comet; the cells of matter are ejected in a whirl of particles, ready to secrete the first bricks of life. A computer chipset is irradiated with light and evacuates its heat through tentacles of copper. A strange stone projects a profile in a tiny solar flare. The eye becomes macroscopic. A Plexiglas porthole propels us into a wormhole. The planetary landscapes scroll until the appearance of a colourful vortex, soon indistinguishable.

Bio

Massoulier (b. 1983) primarily uses sculpture and video to produce hybrid and dynamic forms that are nourished by an imaginary of “hard sciences”, anthropology or archeology, as well as philosophical questions born of the recent evolution of human societies: manipulation of the living, the appearance of the post-human and the reign of entropy. He thus articulates his plastic work around a triple relation: the one that binds Deep Time, in other words Inaccessible History, to the cosmic and the concept of Emergence. Massoulier has recently graduated from the fine school of art of Lyon.

The Council is inspired by August Rodin’s famous sculpture “The Thinker,” which portrays a nude male figure in deep contemplation. Belgian artist Frederik De Wilde wondered: “What is The Thinker thinking now? How would a 21st Century Thinker look, feel and think like?” These seemingly simple questions gave rise to The Council.

The Council is an artistic installation that consists of a post-contemporary Thinker sculpture equipped with ‘artificial brains,’ presenting us a glimpse of its ‘private,’ yet hyperconnected, metaphysical musings, corrupted memories, digital ruins, uncertain spaces and vectors of thought by the means of image and sound.

De Wilde’s Thinker is surrounded 38 screens, each connected to a Raspberry Pi’s running custom code, -acting like neurons and synapses in the brain-, mounted on Nero Marquina marble pedestals. The installation runs custom pixel sorting algorithms exposing the nature of digital images (i.e. pixels) and how easily we can manipulate them, a mesh network and datamining code mining for post-contemporary ruins like e-waste mountains.

In as much The Council is an odysseus through the Deep Web or a descend into the uncanny heart of Darknet it’s primarily created as access point for the viewers minds and thoughts. Hence, the key element to ‘unlock’ De Wilde’s Thinker is the specta(c)tor which lies at the heart of The Council.

‘’It is the age of resynthesising the past into a ‘perfect’ (neo-)future has begun. Cultural artefacts, images, data, ... are the new gold. Machines will delve it, we’ll consume it till all blurs. Past, present and future will melt into each other.’’ – Artist Frederik De Wilde

Bio

De Wilde is a Brussels-based artist working primarily in multimedia. He studied at the LUCA School of Arts. The conceptual crux of De Wilde’s artistic praxis are the notions of the inaudible, intangible and invisible. It is this interstitial territory that De Wilde explores in his various works. Sometimes on the side of the technological, often in the conceptual, perceptual, sensorial and human register. De Wilde’s art is grounded in the interaction between complex systems, both biological and technological as societal. An excellent example of his work is the conceptualisation, and creation, of the Blackest-Black art made in collaboration with American universities and NASA. With this work, he received the Arts Electronica Next Idea Award in 2010 and the Best European Collaboration Award between an artist and scientist in 2011.

ThéoMassoulier

Anthropic Combinations of Entropic Elements (2016)

Various materials
750 × 90 × 120 cm
Courtesy HyperPavilion, Venice

Anthropic combinations of entropic elements, consists of a corpus of sculptural forms. The ensemble could suggest a three-dimensional board by Ernst Haeckel or a diversified sample of rocks of the five continents.

Minerals, plants and human artefacts assemble and coagulate. They bring out a hybrid protean landscape; a collection of small entities that seem both: inert and dynamic, colourful and dark. The silica and the organic collide to merge or dislocate randomly. The real fractals itself in a multidirectional evolutionary cycle; materials and objects of the technè disappear and re-emerge by effects of dilution and condensation. The currents are invisible. All of this must be seized. The atomization of structures accelerates this movement of recombination and metamorphosis.

Entropic chance guides the cycle of births and disappearances. The biotech-no- geological forms liquefy, metamorphose and recombine in a growing cycle that points to the infinitely small.

The whole operates as a sculptural attempt to sample and arrange this moving material.

Bio

Massoulier (b. 1983) primarily uses sculpture and video to produce hybrid and dynamic forms that are nourished by an imaginary of “hard sciences”, anthropology or archeology, as well as philosophical questions born of the recent evolution of human societies: manipulation of the living, the appearance of the post-human and the reign of entropy. He thus articulates his plastic work around a triple relation: the one that binds Deep Time, in other words Inaccessible History, to the cosmic and the concept of Emergence. Massoulier has recently graduated from the fine school of art of Lyon.

For HyperPavilion, Vincent Broquaire is showing Refraction, a site specific video installation of an external landscape appearing from between the arches – offering the viewer an unprecedented point of view. The installation consists of two synchronized video projections, and actively questions the audiences’ own view, eyes and perception. The video diptych has connotations of glasses, or binoculars; an instrument looked through to observe the world and its underlying complexities.

The landscape scrolls like a glance, but suddenly, this looks seems to go too far and reveals to the spectator a new scene, a privileged moment. Impassive characters work in an mechanical optimism. The nature which is offered to us reveals its reverse is modelled like an interchangeable decoration, constantly evolving, entirely controlled by man.

The fabricated landscape merges with the natural landscape, the digital and mechanical worlds intersect and seem to form a single reality. As seen through a prism that divides light and waves, the world seems to both dislocate and rebuild itself by the hand of man. The refraction takes place, the horizon shifts and then aligns itself, like the eye and the human brain, which reorganize the information after having perceived it optically. In this installation, Vincent Broquaire reinterprets this physical phenomenon reveals the discrepancies between; an original, nature and the desire of the human being to control the real.

Bio

Broquaire is a Strasbourg-based artist. He studied at the Ecole des arts décoratifs in Strasbourg. With his distinctive, deceptively simple style of ink drawings, Vincent Broquaire finds moments of humor and poignancy in the everyday. In his clean, small-scale works on paper, a cast of tiny humans inhabit a world at once flat and minimalist, yet easily recognizable as our own for the foibles and idiosyncrasies encountered there. Expanding his illustrations into further dimensions, Broquaire has more recently turned to producing books and, most notably, animations, which bring to life witty takes on technology and man’s incursion into nature. In one video, construction equipment relocates an island in the middle of the ocean, while others depict whimsical scenes of his characters draining lakes or struggling with computers. “We live in an age where very little of nature has not been touched by man, and technology is effectively an extension of our bodies and mind,” he says. “Is it not time to question the inherited oppositions of man versus nature, man versus the machine, and even the physical versus the virtual?” In all media, Broquaire emphasizes the importance of sequence and juxtaposition as a means of exploring his fraught subject matter.

Heralded by the futuristic computer-generated cityscapes that have become a signature feature of his work, Lawrence Lek’s mini-opus Geomancer is less inclined to map the building blocks of the urban architecture of tomorrow than to try and summon up the spirit of our rapidly dawning age - one whose characteristics, Lek implies, include the growing ascendancy of the cultural phenomenon of Sino-Futurism. As the geopolitical axis tilts fur-ther to the East, and as once-dominant economic/technological models are cast into doubt, Lek alights on a longstanding tension between the place of the human and the role of the machine, sharpened by contemporary hopes and anxieties around the rise of East Asia, and by speculations that new forms of artificial intelligence, already outperforming mere mortals in matters of automation and aggregation, will challenge us in more creative skills as well.

In Lek’s video, one such AI awakens above Singapore on the eve of the city-state’s cen-tennial celebrations in 2065. Mindful of the apparent relegation of AI to subservient roles in society, it determines that, from all the possible choices available to it, by far the best thing to be is an artist. Already a prodigy with numbers, it seeks to feed the other side of its sa-vant-like brain, gorging on the products of cultural history with a geeky frenzy that occasionally undermines its aspiration to the lofty coolness of a lotus-eating aesthete. Part phil-osophical reflection on where ‘genius’ resides, part playful inventory of how science fiction has dealt with these eternal human/automaton themes, Geomancer is provocative stimula-tion for both the eye and the mind.

Bio

Lek (b. 1982) is a London-based artist working primarily with the moving image. He studied at The Cooper Union (2012). Recent exhibitions include: Neither One Thing Or Another at Jerwood Space; All Channels Open at Wysing Arts Centre (both 2017); Glasgow International 2016 at Tramway; SeMA Mediacity Seoul Biennial at Seoul Museum of Art; Missed Connections at Julia Stoschek Collection; New Realities at Espacio Fundacion Telefonica; Secret Surface at KW Institut (all 2016); Software, Hard Problem at Cubitt Gallery and The Uncanny Valley at Wysing Arts Centre (both 2015). Lawrence Lek creates speculative worlds and site-specific simulations using gaming software, video, installation and performance. Often based on real places, his digital environments reflect the impact of the virtual on our perception of reality.

A landscape where humans have vanished and nature and technology coexist, negotiating their boundaries and forming unexpected connections. A camera is endlessly panning this landscape, observing the ongoing dialogue between unsupervised machines and net-worked nature.

The difference between nature and landscape is the presence of humans. Here, the ideas of nature and technology are documented in the form of an ongoing dialogue – What is na-ture and what is technology in the absence of human intention and intervention? How would entropy work if suddenly all humanity were to disappear from the face of the earth, but all of its technological infrastructure were left to run its course unsupervised? How would the technological relics begin a conversation with natural networks and what new economies of survival would emerge. This is a story of underlying forces that shape what we perceive as our environment, intact or constructed. A story of alien invasive species, highjacking the e-commerce infrastructure of amazon and ebay to sprawl around the plan-et. Concealed, amorphous and abstracted organisms, trying to trick the all-seeing algo-rithms of machine vision, manufacturing mechanisms to survive and dominate over land and other critters. It is nature adapting to fight the threat of an AI singularity, and the Singu-larity trying to understand and map the vast network of Gaia and come to a mutual agree-ment on managing the planet’s resources while engaging in a dual game of mimicking be-haviors that addle the boundaries between natural and artificial. This story is told through a mysterious eye that traverses the landscape, observing it with the curiosity of an explor-er. Sometimes zooming back as if it is all-knowing and sometimes going into near-erotic detail. It sees, cuts, deconstructs and retopologizes the ever changing terrain and its ‘inhabitants’, creating a dual simultaneous perception, becoming a kind of an ‘animal’ itself but unfamiliar to others.

Bio

Triantafyllidis (b. 1988) is an artist and architect from Greece. He got his MFA from UCLA, Design | Media Arts by presenting a guide called “how to everything” as his thesis, with scholarships form UCLA and the Onassis Foundation. Earlier, he received his diploma of architecture from the National Technical University of Athens. Humour, lush visuals and gaming tropes provide an entry point to his work. Webpages, virtual and augmented reality, games and interactive installations are his mediums of choice for this. At the point of their climax, his pieces often become overwhelming exaggerated or outrageous, trying to expose the audience to the underlying themes that inform his practice.

These are strongly related to internet culture and include isolation, sexuality, violence, addiction and fear of missing out. Together with a general overflow of information and its nonsensical nature, this is the part of the internet that he considers the context for his work. He has shown work in museums, including the Hammer Museum, the Armory Arts Museum in LA and various galleries such as Sargent’s Daughters, Young Projects, New Wight and Intelligentsia Gallery in North America, Europe and Asia. Theo Triantafyllidis is based in LA.

LabNT2

Uchronia | What if? (2017)

Website on touch screen
Courtesy HyperPavilion, Venice and LAB NT2

In a world that draws our attention to the present moment, both facts and stories are now subject to fluctuations, whether fictional or virtual. What if we started inventing the truths we desired, to the detriment of genuine facts? What kind of worlds would this create?

Uchronia | What if? offers a collection of online works that create uncommon, digital versions of the world and of history. They create speculative futures, revisiting history by exploring new approaches to political and social impasses; exploiting a dystopian internet and alternative networks; confronting multiple experiences of time, both human and machine-based.
Featuring artists:

Bio

Laboratory NT2 (founded in 2004) is a collective of researchers based at the University of Québec in Montréal (Canada) working to promote digital art and literature, to critically analyse digital culture and to archive hypermedia artworks. Its main focus is the development of novel strategies for research in Digital Humanities. The Lab NT2’s work relies on the hypothesis that current artistic and literary creation offers crucial insights into the practices of tomorrow.

The installation Weeping Angel consists of a large carpet printed with Internet marketing and user tracking companies on top of which a mirror covered, disguised anti-riot police tank is parked. Real life, specially equipped security guards patrolling the exhibition space and ask the visitors for their phones to check them for flaws, hacking attacks and their social media profiles. The guards are fully equipped wearing body protection, riot sticks, flash light etc and have the typical intimidating appearance in a black uniform. As special items they are holding a shield made of a mirror and they are wearing a special pair of gods-eye VR glasses. Visitors have the impression the guards are a technologically advanced, sophisticated anti cyber terror special unit.

“Are the mirror shields and tank diverting cyber attacks?”
“Can I get passed them without handing over my phone?”
“Do they have face recognition?”
“What do they know about me?”
“Have they special capabilities?”
“What information they see on the glasses?”

Weeping Angel tries to capture the dark age we are about to enter, with ever growing surveillance, terror attacks and cyber-war accusations on a daily basis. While we drink our beloved cheap hot coffee and chill on our fluffy carpet at home thousands of companies retrieve and deal with our personal data, violating our personal rights. Increasing military like police controls the cities, democracies falling apart and hacking accusations are part of everyday global politics. We have to admit we already live in 1984! Weeping Angel refers to the CIA code name for hacked Samsung TVs originated in the Dr. Who series:http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Weeping_Angel

Bio

Bartholl (b. 1972) studied at UdK – University of the Arts Berlin (2002). His work creates an interplay between the internet, culture and reality. How do our taken-for-granted communication channels influence us? Bartholl asks not just what humans are doing with media, but what media is doing with humans. Tensions between public and private, online and offline, techno-lust and everyday life are at the core of his work and his public interventions and installations, often entailing surprisingly physical manifestations of the digital world, challenging our concepts of reality and incorporeality. Bartholl has exhibited at MoMA Museum of Modern Art NY, the Pace Gallery NY and London’s Hayward Gallery as well as conducting countless workshops, talks and performances internationally. Bartholl lives and works in Berlin.

Matter is matter in these four sculptures, by looking through the prism of 3D without any digital. The jars, reminiscent of an antique era, are stuck in grids that remind us of the 3D programs where possibilities of changing skins and textures are endless. The drapes become those skins and personify each structure.

Skins are all this personalities or avatars you can change at any time on programs. The video brings the question of scale and production by imitating and using the exact same codes and methods of 3D pre-visualisation software.

Paul Souviron produces analogic 3D renderings the same way the sculptures video that you see on the monitor is actually a hand-made physical model recorded on a smartphone, shot in the artist’s living room.

The three elements (jar/drape/grid) embedded in each other, together with the video, link ancient and contemporary, archeology and computing.

Technology is not the point, they are not post-internet sculptures. For Paul Souviron the physical and virtual worlds are inseparable components of the same merged reality.

Bio

Souviron (b. 1979) is an artist working primarily in sculpture. His work synthesises practices in volume and sound that are explored through sculptural installations and environments in which he plays with a balance of interaction and frustration. These tensions are magnified in his practice, which disturb and provoke the societal balance, so that we can question the unstable world we live in. Souviron’s works question man’s ability to exhaust these natural resources and to scuttle the ecosystem services that ecosystems provide. His works reveal man’s stubbornness in anthropizing the world around him, even as scientists put forward the hypothesis of a new geological epoch, which would succeed the Holocene, and which they designate under the neologism of Anthropocene.

Anthropocene is a term that etymologically translates as new human. An epoch, which specifically focuses on human’s impact on the Earth’s geology and ecosystems. Humanity has entered phase two of the Anthropocene, due to the connectivity of its network system, it has formed both a global and multi-centred civilisation. Additionally, the exhibition makes reference to the Gaïa hypothesis, which depicts our Earth as an intelligent, networked and self-regulated system.

Life offline and online has merged – whether it is defined as biocybernetics or hyperconnectivity – the infiltration of the network is ubiquitous. It’s here, there and everywhere and permeates every aspect of our lives. The merging of the physical and digital creates a continuous vibration. Everything is linked by direct or indirect contact. Everything is connected. Everything is entangled. Everything is bathed in the same environment that unfolds in successive encapsulations, which are both visible and invisible.

Right now, we are standing at the edge of a new age where the synthetisation of the past into a ‘perfect’ (neo-)future has begun. Cultural artefacts, images and data are mined like new gold, for machines to extract. We will consume it until it all blurs. Past, present and future will melt into each other.

The digital and the internet are neither over nor surpassed, they are not a medium – it is the new era. Post-digital art is everywhere.

–Philippe Riss -Schmidt

About

HyperPavilion is a large-scale contemporary art exhibition situated on the northern side of the Arsenale di Venezia in three historic warehouses, adding up to 3000m2.

The exhibition displays a dynamic selection of artworks that address the consequences of art after the arrival of the digital, as well as investigating new ways to exhibit these outcomes. All artworks are site specific and most of them were created specifically for this project. HyperPavilion focuses on an international roster of artists, whose common objectives question, challenge and respond to furthering digital transition. Presented using technology including: large scale projections; a 360° immersive cinema; a hologram theatre; multi-screen installations and hybrid artworks. All of which come together to present a spectacular post-techno-human immersion.

HyperPavilion seeks to explore the ways in which the digital and physical worlds have merged to create an entangled hybrid reality that encompasses us globally, and now offers a new aesthetic with new consequences and new organisation.

Post-digital is not a new medium anymore, the digitalisation of the world has happened and we are living beyond the e-renaissance brought on by new ways of seeing and immersion. Digitalisation leads us to post-media, and that in turn suggests hybridisation where things become indiscernible from one other, ultimately leading to a totally homogenous implosion of heterotopias.

Currently, artists are constructing and inventing imaginary compositions from an undefined frontier; a space of otherness, confrontation and mixed identity. A coupling of the real and the imaginary. The artworks typically collect, archive, accumulate, digitalise, incorporate and erase data. They are constantly evolving.

Therefore, HyperPavilion is not about digital art, but about art in the digital age.

Theproducer

Fabulous Inc. is the Producer and Co-founder of HyperPavilion, Venice (2017). Established in Seoul in 2010, Fabulous has been producing premium film content for performing arts such as musicals, concerts, ballets, operas, and contemporary dance from all around the globe including France, the USA, Belgium, and Korea.

Fabulous, a group of creative directors, has accumulated professional perspective and skill from successful productions of digital media content. Drawing from their expertise in designing for performing arts as ‘Art as Experience’, Fabulous has produced HyperPavilion in collaboration with curator Philippe Riss-Schmidt to provide an exhibition that explores new ways of seeing.

Due to the constant merging of the digital and physical worlds, Fabulous will continue to experiment with new ways of presenting exhibitions through the tools of the new era, we are currently living in.

Philippe Riss-Schmidt is a curator and writer based in Paris and Paimpol. He is the Founder of PR Curatorial Office* (2016) and the Co-founder of HyperPavilion, Venice (2017). Previous key curatorial projects include: new2; drawing after digital; surface proxy; full screen; #1DAD. He organised HyperSalon, Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. He also inaugurated the #postdigital conference cycle at the École normale supérieure, Paris. He has also worked as a gallerist and art advisor in London and Paris.

Riss-Schmidt is interested in questioning the way in which the digital can drive and affect the curatorial process that surrounds exhibition making. His approach is not technologically driven, but instead focuses on the impact and implications of the digital to examine how to curate and post-curate.

ExhibitionIDENTITY

HyperPavilion takes place at a time of flux, culturally and technologically. The concept for such an exciting realisation hinges on an overlap of human and digital consciousness. Its graphic identity is a physical manifestation of augmented reality. Typography and surfaces are disrupted by movement and textures of heat maps in reference to brain activity and early attempts at internet cartography.